Brain Sweat

Take the number of your fingers multiplied by the number of your toes divided by one half and add it to the number of months in a year. What is the total?

Prime
Numbers

1,500 – Minimum number of U.S. surgical patients sewn up each year with sponges, clamps or other tools left inside them

90,000 – Number of Americans who died in 2002 from infections they contracted while hospitalized for other
ailments

4.6 – Number of seconds required to download the entire printed contents of the
Library of Congress using the Cisco Systems CRS-1 route, a machine capable of pushing
data at a rate of 92 trillion bits per second

82 – Number of years it would require a dial-up modem to move the same amount of data

Sources: The New England Journal of Medicine; Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention; Guinness Book of World Records; New Scientist

Verbatim

There's no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

– Edward Teller

Brain Sweat Answer

The total is 212, or 10x10=100 divided by 1/2=200+12=212. For anatomical sticklers, who note that people have eight fingers and two thumbs, the answer is 172, or 8x10=80 divided by 1/2=160+12=172.

"True Facts"

Twelve percent of all lightning fatalities occur on golf courses.

The total distance covered by a laser beam when playing a CD is more than three miles.

The Asian elephant is the only other animal, besides humans, that has demonstrated the ability to stand on its head – and only then with training and a whole lot of coaxing.

An engineer named Ray Tomlinson invented e-mail in 1971, but unlike earlier great communicators like Samuel Morse, Tomlinson did not come up with a pithy first-ever message, no "What hath God wrought?"

The first e-mail message, sent by Tomlinson to another computer in the same room, was "QWERTYUIOP." Or something like that. Tomlinson admits he doesn't recall exactly. He says it might have been something as dramatic as "TESTING 1234."

Cirrus, as in cirrus clouds, is Latin for "curl of hair." As for the other three main cloud descriptions: cumulus means heap, stratus means layer and nimbus means rain.

Datebook

Archaeologist David Whitley, a leading expert on aboriginal rock art, will give a 7:30 p.m. picnic lecture Saturday in the courtyard of the Pe×asquitos Ranch House. The discussion of native rock art is the latest in a series of Saturday summer lectures hosted by the San Diego County Archaeological Society. For more information and directions, call (858) 538-0935 or visit www.sandiegoarchaeologicalsociety.com.

Abstracts

In the pantheon of celestial lights, Johannes Kepler shines among the brightest, a
17th-century
astronomer whose discoveries fundamentally changed the way we understand planetary motion and
behavior.

But did he kill for everlasting fame?

Re-examining 400-year-old forensic evidence and other materials, the Gilders conclude yes: Kepler secretly poisoned his employer, the redoubtable Tycho Brahe, to obtain astronomical data he needed for his own pioneering research.

Pop goes the theory

Among materials scientists, there's a prevailing theory that says a material cannot rip or rend faster than the speed of sound, which is about 1,116 feet per second at sea level.

Sounds reasonable, but researchers at the University of Texas at Austin noticed that fragments of popped balloons often
sported wavy edges, which no existing
theory about the behavior of cracking material could
explain.

So they took high-speed pictures of balloons being popped, only to discover that the cracks ripped through the exploding rubber faster than sound. As far as the researchers know, popping balloons are the only systems in which this occurs, though it may ultimately prove to be a common phenomenon in rubbery
materials.